


Conjurer

by elephant_eyelash



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Literacy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 09:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/417539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gift fics focussing on Arya/Gendry and Gendry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conjurer

(1)  
  
He tries to conjur up poetry for her with his hands, to craft songs from metal, but fails. He knows he can make her sing, because when she shudders and the noise and colour rushes out of her (from him, the musician, and the power is drugging) he can hear all the fragments of beauty converge: lilting flutes from King’s Landing, Tom’s broken melodies, the rush of a river. Love, he thinks, but theirs’ is hard to fashion, and the word touches him as she curls asleep beside him. Love, I love you, I love her. He turns the words over and over again in his mind, letting his tongue run past the strangeness, this new language.  
  
He feels the shape of the words as he mouths it into her skin, trying to make it feel right, willing her in her dreams to hear him.  
  
(2)  
  
He runs his fingers over the spine of the books, thin and frail.  
  
He had always seen books as study, intimidating things. But when you reduced them to their elements all they were were paper, thread, leather. Fire doesn’t destroy steel, he had thought arrogantly, and books do not protect life (or destroy it, he thinks, but the uncomfortable symmetry between steel and life and death makes him feel ill). Yet the power of them he could see slowly emerge, even in this brutal world.  
  
Davos had told Gendry to be brave and take out a book from the Wall’s library. Gendry had emerged, bristled and defensive, ready to attack, to burn those who would laugh at him, but the Maester was kind (so kind Gendry was suspicious, for the rich; and he was rich, he could tell, just could; were not kind to the likes of him).  
  
Samwell tells him it is useful to study history. Samwell tells him history is useful because you learn mistakes from the past. Gendry laughs and brushes his boot along the sawdust floor, picks up a book.  
  
“Then why do men keep making the same mistakes?” Gendry asks.  
  
“Oh but history is wonderful to read.” The Maester said, quick and animated. He began talking about battles evoked in simple, clear metaphors; men travelling Westeros with bare feet and quills, recording the lives of kings and queens. And all Gendry can think of is those in the margins with strangled, silenced voices, and how the past for them was always an immediate, visceral loss, not something to be pondered over and recorded finely on gold-leafed manuscript.  
  
He doesn’t tell Samwell this, because he is kind and sincere, and doesn’t avoid him like most of the noble men on the Wall, so he sits down and reads of a King, some King with a name like many other Kings, doing things Kings did. There are no blacksmiths in stories, he thinks, or bastards who were good and decent and brave. The women all lay down, fragrant and passive, ready to break. Knights didn’t rape or steal. The book made him feel lonely, like a mirror that had distorted his reflection and told him what he knew was false. He shut his eyes. The words were cruel in their plainness, in their easy resolutions.  
  
He picks up a book on Valyrian steel and sighs happily. Here the world is ordered. Here he is important, for his craft is the skeleton of the stories— knights needed armour, their horse-shoes— though the thought emerges, sudden and cruel in its clarity, of the part he plays as the originator of death, of the easy destruction he had despised all these years.  
  
He shakes and places the book down, method memorised. He goes to the forge and works harder than ever before, exorcising the words from his body with taut muscle.


End file.
